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Josie Cunningham – The Abortion Debate.

The Anna Raccoon Archives

by Kingbingo on April 26, 2014

‘Kingbingo’, a committed Libertarian, writes: The 16 week ultrasound scan was a source of utter delight for us both. Being first time parents, neither of us really knew what to expect. About all I did know was that we were legally well within the 24 week abortion limit, such was the extent of my knowledge of the whole pregnancy thing which up until now was always something that happened to ‘other people’. What we actually saw that day was not, as I might have assumed, an embryo, a lump of cells with some rudimentary human proportions, what we saw was our child. It did not just have a head, it had a face with clearly identifiable nose, eyes, ears, chin. It did not just have crude limb like growths, it had arms and legs and waved them around with gleeful abandon during the scan and even performed various acrobatic flips and turns, kicking her little legs and arms all over the place. I felt an immediate and powerful protective urge, and my paternal instincts started to come to fruition.

It also delivered an almighty slap to the face of what I thought I knew about the rights and wrongs of abortion and fractured my previously held comfort in the knowledge that pro-lifers were religious zealots ready to ride roughshod over the sanctity of a woman’s right to choose over the needs of a theoretical human life. Furthermore, my guiding morality was based on my libertarianism. People had the perfect right to choose how to live their lives and make choices for themselves. If a woman did not want to carry a child, how dare the state foist that choice upon her, leaving that poor woman at the mercy of unsafe illegal abortions?

The holding of absolute beliefs is generally considerably easier when you are as unburdened as possible by any first-hand knowledge.

I always knew that what goes into the process is little more than a few cells and what eventually comes out is a fully formed and very adorable Winston Churchill lookalike. But the actual point at which the termination of an embryo becomes murder, was never clear to me and like many people I just looked at a 40 week term and concluded that if the legal limit was 24 weeks, about halfway, then that seems about right. Now having seen my own child at 16 and then at 20 weeks, I find the idea of terminating at 16 weeks let alone 24 as something that sickens me. I can tell you first hand, those are not a theoretical ‘anything’, they are not bundles of cells, those are human lives that are getting discarded.

Which brings me to Josie Cunningham a young British ‘model’ who wants to abort her baby of 18 weeks so that she can appear on the TV series Big Brother and have a career in being a TV celebrity. You and I dear taxpayer, have also recently shelled out £5,000 so that the NHS could give her celebrity size breasts too. Here is the delightful young woman in her own words “This time next year, I won’t have a baby, but I will be famous and have a bright pink Range Rover. I’m finally on the verge of becoming famous and I won’t ruin it now. An abortion will further my career – nothing is going to stop me.” A quick Google search of her name and you will be treated to many more of her musings, all of which will most likely convince you:

1) This woman seems incapable of thinking beyond her own immediate desires and needs. She is callous and shallow. 2) She is utterly deluded over her minuscule chances of becoming rich and famous without any talent whatsoever. 3) She would be an utterly horrendous mother. 4) She will obviously end up having other children in a few years’ time anyway, because she is too thick to understand contraception or plan ahead.

I despair that people like this inhabit the same world as me. This woman has evidently grown up never once considering education and hard work as the route to a good life. She just wants to be rich and famous by being on the telly, and even more depressingly we live in a society where every so often a girl like that does actually become rich and famous for no seemingly good reason at all. I was also be sickened by her casual dismissal of her unborn child, although Jose probably does not think of it as a child. But also I was sickened because at her age, and perhaps as recently as before I saw my daughter for the first time on our first ultrasound scan,

I would have not grasped just how awful she was being. I may even have agreed with awful Jose that it was just an embryo, and not a life.

As such I find myself in one of life’s most uncomfortable positions, suddenly realising that everything I thought I knew was wrong, and when I try to alight upon the ‘right answer’ I find there is not one, the issue is too big and complex for any binary answer.

If ‘awful Jose’ were to have that child, any betting man would have to say with a mother like that it will almost certainly grow up to be a less than productive human being, quite possibly a destructive one. Furthermore, I can’t help but be persuaded by the argument made in the excellent economics light-reading ‘Freakonomics’ that it was the overturning of Roe vs Wade in the US that, 20 years later finally ended the US crime boom. Authors Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt argued that the absence of unwanted children, following legalisation of abortion in 1973, led to a reduction in crime 18 years later, starting in 1992 and dropping sharply in 1995. These would have been the peak crime-committing years of the unborn children. Young women after the legalisation of abortion, who knew full well that they could not properly raise a child, did not have them. Often these women would be uneducated, with no father around and would have little hope of reining in a powerful teenage male down the line, or offering a teenage daughter a better life than her own.

I set out in this piece a highly personal case for why I have come to love so deeply my, as yet, unborn daughter. But I like to think I did everything right. I worked hard on getting educated and then a career. I enjoyed my early 20’s as a single man then met the right girl and started to settle down. We got married and bought a family home, and all I can think about now is how to offer little ‘Princess Bingo’ the very best start in life.

But now I have new found respect for unborn human life, does that mean I want to live in a society in which the state forces young unsuitable mothers to have a child they are ill-equipped to raise? Well No!

But I have nevertheless grown as a person recently, and the only thing I am certain of now is just how difficult this issue is and how foolish I once was to assume there is an easy answer.

This is the natural and obvious consequences of having abortion available to all women without genuine control by doctors, in essence stupid and shallow people getting terminations for trivial reasons.

Not wanting a baby is neither trivial nor, um, non-trivial. It simply “is” as a preference. I’m not entirely clear why abortions would be preferably restricted to the clever and deep. Should the application be required in Shakesperian sonnet form, or something?

The point really is that abortion is not a medical matter. It’s a choice based on personal preference. If you’re going to ban it on moral or rights grounds, fine. I have myself argued that there is a good case against it from a libertarian perspective.

But if not, the pantomime of asking a doctor for permission is ridiculous. Women have abortions (overwhelmingly) because they simply do not want to have a baby right now, and so it has always been. The question of why they feel that way is nobody’s business but theirs.

Well, logically the start of life is conception. After that, you’re just arguing about how long a piece of string is. If you want people to be able to commit murder before some point but not after, it will always be arbitrary. If it’s murder.

Practically, though, women have been trying to rid themselves of unwanted sprogs since the start of history and no doubt before, and they’re going to carry on whether it’s legal or not. Which is much the same as people being gay whether it’s legal or not and people taking drugs whether it’s legal or not and people looking at porn whether it’s legal or not. So it seems unrealistic to me to ban it. The reality is that many women do not, and never have, wanted to make an 18 year or so commitment to the result of some negligent lust, so, I dunno, probably best to go with the old Christian before-the-quickening thing and restrict it to the first trimester. Or something.

I really don’t see what getting all snippy about the moral character of an aspirant model has to do with the issue.

Having a baby has become a ‘lifestyle choice’ akin to that of a pink Range Rover or designer handbag. The flipside of the ‘quick abortion brigade’ are the girls (an increasing number, alas) who choose to have a baby as a direct route to ‘adult responsibility’ they feel otherwise locked out from – the only way they stop themselves being infantilised selfish shallow little wretches. Of course, most stay just that but wear the “I have responsibilities now, I am a Good Person” schtick like a badge, and another idiot is borne unto this facile society. The rise of the ‘4×4 Club’ celebrities (4 bairns, 4 dads) also promotes this “Motherhood = Sainthood” philosophy that, naturally, exempts the beastly males as mere tools and bankrollers. I am sure Miss Cunningham will, once she has her fame, seek to ‘right wrongs’ by being a celebrity Mum like all the other arseholes already famous for being idiots.

This article raises very important points, and identifies the most basic failing of modern British society, which is something no politician or economist can sort out. Only solution is for the more intelligent members of society to resume the much-derided Victorian effort towards social “uplift” and regeneration, which over two or three generations of concerted effort gave us much of what we now take for granted about the positive side of our way of life. Much of these gains have been pissed away since the 1950s.

However one thing the article doesn’t mention is that in practice, a “woman’s right to choose” is actually her “boyfriend’s right to choose” or even her “boyfriend’s mother’s right to choose.” Many women are put under enormous pressure to “get rid of it” once the terrifying prospect of responsibility is foreseen.

As regards the reasons for the long term fall in crime rates, “Freakonomics” as usual gives an interesting but somewhat trite explantion. The whole question was discussed last Monday on quite a good Radio 4 programme, which identified several possible explanations. Violent crime rates have declined steadily from the Middle Ages onwards, but the long term trend was interrupted by a sharp upward turn from around the 1950s to the early 1990s. This is seen all over the Western world, not just UK. There are several possible explantions, none of them mutually exclusive, and not all of whch were discussed in the programme. However the least likely explanation was that any policy changes by governments or police had much to do with it.

Welcome to the joys of parenthood. May all go well, through birth, childhood and onwards. There’s something new every day

And welcome to the Temptation of the Libertarian’s Curse, the drawing of your own firm line in the moral sand, on the other side of which all who stand may be judged to have moved from white, or grey, into the blackness of outer darkness, on the basis of one’s own perceptions of fact and circumstance. Someone famous once said something about judging not, that you be not judged… I wonder who it was, and what he meant?

I’ve not heard it called the Libertarian’s Curse before, but I suppose that a good term for the age old problem that in ‘On liberty’ John Stuart Mill opined on. Self regarding liberties, and other regarding liberties, the idea that libertarians support liberties that don’t come with externalities.

The challenge for libertarians always being “where do they cross?”

When does abortion change from a self regarding liberty? When does being fat become an other regarding liberty in a world when other people have to pay for your NHS treatment? etc

Ok, so let’s move on a little. Between now and the final legal date for termination, what if you were to be told that that beautiful little embryo were to be carrying a genetic disorder, of the nature that they would, while other in some respects be capable of a life of normal emotional development and other such viability, but their physical state would likely be such that they might be unable to function as their peers and waste away on a shortened lifespan? (I know that there is a similar case right now in the headlines but I don’t want us to get sidetracked by specifics there)

The decision is now much less simple, for all three of you, and becomes even more complicated in the presence of other siblings.

Does your current volte face preclude a further reversal of mind? And how do you think others would judge you should you decide that a termination would on balance, after trying to exercise righteousness in that, would be the right thing to do? And those who know nothing of the background, or only part, and merely see the end result, who are they to condemn you, merely because they at one point thought as you too once did?

So what do we really know of this. Some newspaper, some jottings, some aspirations. But what do we really know about how she got to be like this. Would we be any different in similar circumstances? I’m not implying it is relevant here – I simply don’t know – but Solomon wasn’t too far wrong when, inter alia, he wrote that the sins of the parents are visited on children, and the children’s children

There’s no harm in telling people that there are better ways of doing things but condemning them out of hand for what they are, where they are, without knowing why, is to very much risk a judgement too far and worse, leads so easily to peoples enforcing their morality on others, even I the absence of any yardstick to do so other than their own personal prejudices

The famous bloke also said something to the effect that by the rule that you use to judge others, so you will be judged. The most rigid of authoritarians really should have a great deal to fear, but self righteousness is the best blindfold ever made

Just out of curiosity, how do the tabloid press find the Josie Cunninghams of this world? Do they go talent spotting? Or is it more a case of Josie wanting publicity so much that she contacted them first? How much did she get paid?

The whole thing is bizarre. But then so is a lot of what constitutes ‘news’ these days.

“forces young unsuitable mothers to have a child they are ill-equipped to raise?”

Far as I know the last ‘perfect’ human being managed to get himself nailed to tree about 2000 years ago. As there have been, thankfully, no more perfect human beings since him, it’s fair to say that there are,ipso fuckso, NO PERFECT parents. Nor even ‘suitable’ parents. No one hits the birthing sheet with an innate parental ability. The first monthly bleed might bestow fertility upon a girl but it doesn’t bestow maternal skills.

Saying ‘unsuitable mothers’ suggests that there are suitable ones. There ain’t. Every single mother (and father) starts from point zero or the ‘WTF am I supposed to do???!!’ point, no matter how many ‘Baby Care’ classess they may have attended or how stable their income or relationship.

A childhood with younger siblings and a mother who thought her lads should be able to cope with “women’s work” left me at age 18 able to fold a cloth terry nappy blindfolded and know how to wash it too. I knew exactly how to make up formula, make hand made baby food, and feed and care for any spawn of my loins. Was I a ‘suitable’ father? No.

The underage, single, mixed up Mother Of Our Granddaughter was definitely NOT a suitable mother but she became one and her parenting skills put mine own to shame….and now I have to go moonpig her an 18th birthday card.

When I first read of this case, my immediate thought was “Keep the baby, abort the mother.” Still seems to make sense.

I find it a paradox that at about the same time as abortion was made legal, the Pill became available, but abortion numbers grew enormously – in fact at one point, before I stopped paying attention, the women’s movement seemed to be trying to make abortion compulsory.

“The holding of absolute beliefs is generally considerably easier when you are as unburdened as possible by any first-hand knowledge.”

I like that!

“I always knew that what goes into the process is little more than a few cells…”

Actually, those cells (usually) already contain all the genetic information for “grow this into a full-sized person”.

“When I try to alight upon the ‘right answer’ I find there is not one, the issue is too big and complex for any binary answer.”

It ought not to be difficult. At conception is the beginning of a brand new human being: a unique person, all things going as planned, therefore I consider that to terminate this new creation at any stage to be murder. And at what point does the soul start inhabiting the physical body? At conception? From the 6th or 7th week when the heart starts to beat? Before birth, I would say, as babies born at 23 weeks have survived. Maybe long before.

There are many issues around ‘legalised’ abortion, like when unborn babies thought to have a disability can be butchered right up to birth. And some experts are advocating ‘post-birth abortion’ citing that a baby isn’t really a person yet. And ‘assisted suicide’ fans seem to be getting more going their way. The Liverpool ‘Care’ Pathway has even seen people who aren’t terminally ill starved and dehyrdated to death. Killing unborn babies cheapens life.

As for the cliché, “A woman’s right to control her own body” and its variations, doesn’t come into it when there are two bodies involved. How much simpler can it be? This is feminist claptrap. Fighting talk from dysfunctional females – normal women have nurturing instincts – who think that having a child will tie them down from doing whatever else it is that they think is more important.

And who has the greatest right anyway? Surely, the unborn human’s right to life trumps evereyone else’s perceved rights? And why do we never hear about the man’s rights? It’s his child too, regardless of who’s body it’s in.

As for the alleged link to a reduction in crime, statistics without proof can be very useful to further a case. Like the totally ridiclulous assertion from Scotland that in 2007 the 17% fall in admissions for heart attacks was due to the first year of the indoor smoking ban. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2007/09/10081400

And finally, you can judge a society on how it treats its most vulnerable and since abortion was legalised, we’ve gone right downhill.

“…. the unborn human’s right to life ….” What about babies who have no or extremely little chance of *any* life outside the womb? I know of a young lady who aborted her first two babies. The first had no kidneys and lungs so undeveloped that he would never have been able to take a breath. The second had a malformed urinary system such that he would have been on kidney dialysis from birth, and an encysted heart which caused an internationally-acclaimed consultant to express surprise that it was still beating at 23 weeks. Would you have had this young lady carry the first one to term, knowing that he *would* die as soon as he was born, or was she justified in ‘turning off the life-support’ when she did? Should she have continued with the second pregnancy until her babies heart stopped naturally? Both the foregoing? Neither? Where would you draw the line? This is an example of just why “the issue is too big and complex for any binary answer.”

Sylvia, in our particular case we agreed that we would abort if the scan or other tests revealed disability.

I have not become ‘pro-life’ following my experience, I’m just saying that I have grave moral concerns over the ‘pro-choice’ stance. Ultimately, I suppose I remain ‘pro-choice’ but in the event of a healthy baby, I am now greatly discomfited by that being a choice that is still on offer at 24 weeks!

@Kingbingo. A thought provoking piece. I’m not sure – from what you write – you’d find decisions concerning disability come with easy answers either. For example, whatever anyone makes – and it’s certainly not beyond critical analysis – of this video, it suggests there may be other generalisation which might not hold up under equally careful consideration:

Kingbingo, I’m with you on this one. My comment above was in response to Stewart Cowan’s “I consider that to terminate this new creation at any stage to be murder” and other parts of his lengthy comment which seemed to me to be saying that there is never any justification for a termination.

But in Kingbingo’s case, a voluntary termination decision was not part of the scene – this is a cherished pregnancy by a couple wanting and deserving a much-loved child. I wish all three of them well with the whole parenting experience. Josie Cunningham is at the other extreme of the scale. Between those two points are many other people who, despite contraceptive advances, can find themselves facing a very difficult decision, one in which they need to weigh all the complex issues involved in a potential child-birth and thereafter. I’ve been there and it was far harder than I ever imagined, possibly the most difficult personal decision of my life.

I have always supported the right to choose and, when carried out by those willing and able to consider all the issues, should lead to the optimum outcome for all concerned. Ms Cunningham applies her own values to the process, values which most of us would consider facile, but that’s part of the price of permitting the right to choose. The alternative is a return to the bad old days of back-street practitioners, with all that entails, which must be the worst option.

If we disapprove of Ms Cunningham’s approach, we can demonstrate that by not buying any newspapers or watching any TV programmes in which she features. If enough people feel strongly enough to do that, then publishers and producers will take note and stop appealing to her kind as content – I fear not enough will, so the game will play on.

I agree with that. Thanks. Put very nicely. Balance is so difficult to achieve

I trust that in your own circs that, whatever you chose to do or however you feel about that now, you and yours managed to get through to as good a place you could manage to achieve. After all, most times, there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in absolute terms, merely choices that feel either better or worse. Even then, the better choice isn’t necessarily always going to feel good

You can never know with absolute certainty that the decision you took was the right one, all you can ever do is be content that you had given the decision process your full consideration of all circumstances at the time and, therefore, it was the best decision you could reach at the time. The next big challenge is to move on, to dismiss any haunting regrets and to continue your life/lives in the new circumstances, unencumbered by thoughts of what might have been – some find that part even harder than the initial decision, as its timescale is potentially life-long.

I read that the young woman already has two children but nothing about them or who looks after them. What I can’t understand is with the pill freely available and morning after pill why is abortion still needed except in cases where some severe abnormality is detected late? I think it is too late to turn the clock back and not sure I would want to but I would prefer to see abortion on demand only up to 12 weeks and very difficult after that. If nothing else at least it might ensure decisions were made earlier. Also we should stop subsidising what we don’t want more of.

Sounds reasonable. You are right about the pill, but many women have all kinds of inhibitions about sex that make them unable to deal realistically with the possibility of pregnancy, and I believe alcohol is often a factor in unwanted pregnancy. Another is that the woman may become pregnant in the hope of entrapping or retaining a man, or perhaps stealing a man from another woman, only to find that once she becomes pregnant, it backfires when he wants nothing to do with it or gets sent to prison in the meantime.

Most likely abortion is less common among the upper middle classes and the better educated. In the US recent figures released indicated that something like over 50% of all African American pregnancies in New York City end in abortion, a stunning figure to be sure, but perhaps one that indicates that unwanted pregancy is more likely in the lower socioeconomic strata.

My experience is similar to that of the author. I have a beautiful child of 18 months and the thought of her being aborted, not that it was ever considered as she was very much wanted, fills me with horror. But then again, that is because I know her now and she has a very loveable personality and an individual character and we already have memories of things she has done like the Easter egg hunt at church where she refused to surrender the egg she found, or her picking up ringing cell phones and shouting “hello”. So it is all in retrospect. Had she been aborted, we would never have known her and the stories about her, and so ignorance would have been relative bliss.

There are so many hard luck stories. The (hypothetical) wife has three kids already, is living in poverty, has poor health, diabetes, high blood pressure, etc., and her husband is a drunk who beats her and runs around with other women, yet refuses to use contraception. Does she really want yet another child however lovely? Should the wife have the right to decide whether to end the pregnancy regardless of what the husband wants? Probably, but one does despair of people who treat human reproduction as a frivolous pastime.

If the State endorses the freedom to choose to terminate the life of one who is unwanted,we can then assume the The Third Reich was justified in endorsing the right of some who wanted to terminate the lives of others who were unwanted by the State. If the State refuses to protect the defenceless unborn who is next,the blind ,the lame the incurably sick,the unwanted elderly. The most primitve right of our species is the right to be born and live a life to the best of our abilty,without that right we lower ourslves to levels below the lowest beast.

What a mess we have got ourselves into. For every woman who uses abortion as a means of birth control we have couples spending fortunes trying to conceive. In the name of choice we abort humans that have no choice. I don’t have an easy answer. I don’t have any answer. I suppose those women who undergo the procedure should be thankful that their mothers didn’t do the same. And should the state have any say? The Fabians seemed to have embraced it early on. H G Wells wrote on it in 1904 in his book Anticipations. And we know what happened once Socialist Germany adopted the idea. No-one objected.

Having a little first hand experience in this area (Present at terminations & knew two girls who underwent the procedure – I also knew the fathers) I read what KingBingo has to say on this issue, I have but this to say.

He sounds like he’ll be a fine parent. He’s committed, passionate about his new cause and appears willing to go the extra mile for his offspring, which is right and good. His genes should continue. He will nurture them. He may also rue the day when his child is between ages age 12-16, but that’s another matter. I wish him and his good lady well.

The object of his ire however is shallow, vapid, with all the brains of a heavily stunned Sea Slug. The abortion procedure may even damage her uterus enough to effectively sterilize her, and maybe even curtail her sex drive altogether. These are only some of the known side effects of abortion, along with a high possibility of depression and sleep disorders. She will undertake these risks voluntarily. Which may rather take the shine off being a Big Brother entrant.

Big Congratulations King Bingo —and to Queen Bingo —-and best of best good fortune to Princess Bingo whose just starting out. Life can be great and the chances of enjoying it are greatly enhanced with good parents—-but as we all know from reading Anna’s blog even children who are not desperately cherished can live meaningful lives that can contribute to others—and even if they don’t contribute to others its a little difficult to argue they have no inherent value —and life for parents is greatly enhanced by a child that is seen as wanted. Perhaps every child being a wanted child has more to do with a failing in perception in the parent of what life might be about than anything else Sure that’s a trite subjective and sweeping judgement by me —no less of course than a woman’s right to choose —-but hell I understand a bit why you have written your blog. You might find reading a bit on the web about Bernard Nathanson , one of the founding fathers of the abortion movement in America interesting —for loads of reasons —-and interestingly why the MSM chose not to report his death so obituaries of his life were left to relatively obscure publications.Possibly of interest to you before you abandon your interest in libertarianism you might find it interesting to look at the perspective of the American Anarchist Philosophy and on from there to ‘Traditional’ Catholic Libertarianism —starting perhaps with Joseph Sobran, who like our landlady had the gifts of literacy logic and courage and a distaste for partial truths as the whole truth. Ultimately it cannot be other than a woman’s choice—that’s just fact —whether that right is simply personal to the woman in a moral sense and no other interests are at stake I don’t know though I suspect there are but at the wire its her choice but its trite and facile to simplify the issue by sloganizing the issue as a woman’s right to choose—-or that there is no right to choose . I suspect part of the problem in identifying the issue that lies at the heart of the abortion debate is that answers have been given before the real question or questions have been identified and the language that has been adopted —- for example murder or a surgical procedure terminating pregnancy (depending on ones subjective opinion) just confuses the issue further. Both sides invariably take the ‘hard’ case –abortion when pregnant through rape or the pink range rover choice —and hard cases make a poor starting point for legislation or cogent moral law. But two of the many underlying issues that seem to indicate that there hasn’t been anywhere near a satisfactory view on the matter are that a potentially sentient creature is valued less than a pink Range Rover by some and Society’s support (glorification?—well tacit approval at least) of it and the other is the view that abortion is seen as ‘appropriate’ to limit the growth of the underclass and quite where those value judgements may lead or elide into might well concern. Perhaps both of these examples show the dangers of subjective value judgements that elide into an ‘objective’ truth upheld by Society —perhaps in due course enforced by Society though for the moment I sense its ‘soft’ coercion by propaganda. . But King Bingo my advice (which you haven’t asked for but I nevertheless really really can’t resist giving)? Just you and Queen Bingo enjoy your happiness—-think of the good times ahead rather than potential problems —if all did then abortion wouldn’t be an issue.

If I were a baby inside a mother as, depicted in the picture, I would not wish to be born. Unless adopted or fostered I would hardly stand a chance of what I experienced as a decent upbringing. I was sometimes got at by a mum made unhappy by my dad being called up late, but I had the brains to stop being so naughty, when I worked out why she was so irritable. I would not like a mum so severely infected by the viruses of some pathetic aspects of our modern culture. Huge plastic boobs. Thick poisoned lips. Artificially coloured skin and a sad desire to be ‘famous’ and possess a pink Range Rover. I hated our RR when we had a dark red one. I was around many years before the abortion act, working on a gynea ward, age 19. It was there to serve the ‘killing field’ that was self induced or Sarah Gamp induced home abortions. The results were sometimes hideously horrendous in the extreme. Some came from our polluted back streets and others from such posh places as Great Budworth. Some died of septicaemia etc. Some were troubled by guilt and depression. Some were happy to have rid of an unwanted child. I was NOT happy working on that ward. I hated to see such suffering and sadness.

I sympathise Ms Mildred. I was in hospital aged about 18 and the girl in the next bed to me had had a back street abortion. We didn’t know that at the time, and moaned and groaned as her screams rent the night depriving us of our beauty sleep. We weren’t very sympathetic. She was a negro girl, and very young, and in the climate of the 60s, that didn’t gain her any extra brownie points either. When she finally shut up in the early hours, the nurses drew a discrete screen round her bed and we realised that she had died. When we later found out why, we were shame faced. That scene has stayed in my mind for 50 years, and definitely coloured my response to abortions – both legal and back street.

Reread and reflected on your blog and on Bernard Nathanson’s views (which I see as rather similar to your own and for the same reasons) and I speculate that perhaps the starting point of any debate on abortion might well be what does one make out intellectually (not limited by scientific analysis of what it is or is not in comparison to an autonomous adult human being but rather trying to ascertain what ‘it’ of itself ‘is’ or ‘is not’) of the scan of an embryo and where that enquiry leads —untainted by subjective prejudice predicated on what ‘objective’ truths ‘Society’ has tried to force on us either now or in the past.